The discovery and first principle of the author of the “Significance of the Alphabet” is, that words are to be considered, not merely or chiefly by their effect on the ear, but in the process of their formation by the organs of speech. Looked at in this point of view, words may be identified at once, although they may sound differently from each other, as garden and hortus and wirta and ogrod and zahrada. And this is the great idea in which lies a revolution not only for the treatment of philology itself, but for the method of intercommunicating the knowledge of all particular languages, and of elucidating all sciences communicable by words.
Dr. Bushnell, having quoted Prof. Gibbs's theory of case, published in the “Christian Spectator,” vol. ix. says, it is there shown that “as words themselves are found in space, so they are declined, or formed into grammar, under the relations of space;” and infers “that such results in grammar do not take place apart from some inherent law or system pertaining either to mind or to outward space, or to one as related to the other;” and adds that it will sometime be fully seen, that “the outer word is a vast menstruum of thought or intelligence. There is a logos in the forms of things, by which they are prepared to serve as types or images of what, is inmost in our souls; and there is a logos also of construction in the relations of space, the position, qualities, connections, and predicates of things, by which they are formed into grammar. In one word, the outer world which envelopes our being is itself language, the power of all language. ‘Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge; there is no speech nor language where their sound is not heard; their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.’”
Let Dr. Bushnell add from Dr. Kraitsir's theory the other element, and see that there is a logos also in the apparatus of articulation; and he will have, but not otherwise, demonstrable ground for his next paragraph, which is eloquent with a suggestion, which, as he justly afterwards remarks, is “sufficient of itself to change a man's intellectual capacities and destiny; for it sets him always in the presence of divine
